Retail outlets/shopping stores today face an exponential increase in the number of customers that visit everyday to buy products. To comply with the increased number of customers, the primary task of a retail outlet is to implement an effective point-of-sale (POS) solution. Presently, the retail outlet uses a bar code scanner-enabled POS system. In the current system, an attendee scans the product selected by the customer and subsequently completes the purchase for the selected products for the customer. This procedure consumes time as the attendee has to manually scan each product selected by the customer and correspondingly prepare an invoice for the customer. As a result, other customers have to wait in a queue to purchase the products.
To enrich the customers' shopping experience, typically, retail outlets presently increase the number of POS systems. However, it proportionally increases the cost incurred by the retail outlet. This proportional increase in the cost is attributed to installing POS systems, maintaining them and salaries for attendees.
Alternately, few retail outlets also provide self check-out POS systems, which are fixed at pre-defined locations, to the customers to select products and complete the purchase. However, this requires a retail outlet to invest significantly in buying multiple self check-out POS systems. Furthermore, the retail outlet would also incur huge maintenance cost for the self check-out POS systems. Moreover, the customer would still have to wait in a queue for their turn to complete the purchase at the corresponding self check-out POS station.
The other solution that is presently used to enrich customer shopping experience is to implement an online shopping store. A customer is provided with an online shopping store platform in his/her computing device. The online shopping store platform enables the customer to browse through one or more products available in the online shopping store and subsequently purchase one or more available products. In this kind of online shopping store, the customer is dependent on the online shopping store for review or the attribute of the products as the customer does not have any physical experience of the products. Moreover, the customer has to still wait for the product to be delivered to him/her.
The above mentioned limitations of the existing retail stores and the online shopping stores give rise to the need for a method, a system, and a computer program product that minimizes the time taken by a customer to complete the purchase of a selected product, while enriching customer's shopping experience in the retail outlet.